


tender we fall

by vesperics



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, POV Hermione Granger, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 19:34:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29906010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vesperics/pseuds/vesperics
Summary: Draco has one night left, and he won’t be alone. Not on Hermione’s watch.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 20
Kudos: 50





	tender we fall

**Author's Note:**

> listen. so many people were writing hermione death trope one-shots on twitter. i had to do this. i’m not proud of it. i’m also confused about how it turned into me writing sad smut. this is not my usual wheelhouse.
> 
> enjoy.

The facility is adjacent to the Ministry, tucked beneath stirring London, accessible only through a modified Floo channel found slipped in between the veneer masonry of an otherwise unassuming Muggle building. One must whisper _Fac me introire_ to the stone, one hand pressed against it, palm forward, skin snug with its coarse expanse. And then it will shift. And then the flames flicker, green and angry. And then the building swallows the visitor like it’s something alive.

Hermione watches the stone seal itself behind her until the heatless fire lick up to her chin and she’s falling, slipping down into the earth and being spat out again in a sparse, dimly-lit chamber. She stumbles for a moment, finding her footing again on this new stretch of ground an impossible amount of stories beneath the city’s pavement.

Sometimes she thinks the Floo Network is a little bit undignified.

“Name?” a guard asks without looking up, poised behind a bare desk.

“Granger,” she says, tugging at the hem of her shirt in an effort to recompose herself.

The guard looks up, then. His eyes are wide and face pales in the cold wash of light that bounces off the chamber’s dispassionate stone walls. “Hermione Granger.”

“Do you need me to check in?” she asks stiffly. “I went through all the necessary processes with the DMLE—”

“Of course,” the guard says, his voice hurried and breathless. “I mean, of course not. No. You don’t need to do anything.”

“Right.”

The guard blinks at her, still frozen in place. “I was told to expect you.”

“OK.” Hermione shifts on her feet, glancing around the space. There’s a single door sunken into the stone beside the guard’s desk, nothing but a slab of dull metal without a handle across the bare hearth she’s stepped out of. “Will someone show me where—”

“Yes!” The guard launches bodily from his seat, finally stirred into movement. “Yes. You can follow me, Miss Granger.”

He steps around the desk and faces the metal plate. Hermione moves to stand behind him, willing her breathing to remain steady, her posture to remain level. She’s good at this sort of thing. Composure.

The guard withdraws his wand, waves it in a complicated pattern, revealing a pattern of orange-bright runes across the metal that sizzle and glow. The panel groans, rings briefly only the way metal can, and then dissolves before their eyes.

He glances over his shoulder, offering Hermione a cursory nod. “Right this way.”

They begin walking and don’t stop for several minutes. She focuses on the uneven stitching of the guard’s light-gray robes instead of what’s happening inside of her.

The concourse is bare and dim, nothing more than a channel of cold concrete buzzing with the faint thrum of magic. She could imagine she’s walking the corridors of Azkaban itself if she didn’t know better — if she didn’t already have a full understanding of the bleakness of that edifice, of its devastating dejection.

Finally, there’s another panel. Another stretch of cold metal. The guard stops in front of it and Hermione knows she can’t keep distracting herself.

She checks her wristwatch, more out of compulsion than necessity. “Six hours, right?”

The guard nods. “Five A.M. sharp. You’ll have to leave, then.”

Hermione glances at the metal, then back to him. She swallows. “And we’ll be... alone?”

“The necessary wards are in place. Unless you want someone—”

“No.” Hermione clears her throat. Her fingers are twitching by her side, like her body is itching to be in motion. “Erm, no. I don’t. Want anyone, I mean.”

“Your wand,” the guard blurts, and then glances away. “Sorry. I have to take your wand, Miss Granger. You can’t take it with you—”

“Right.” She pulls it from her sleeve easily, the knotted switch of vine wood, and hands it over. It’s never a small thing, surrendering a wand — even temporarily. She feels its absence as soon as it’s pulled from her fingers.

The guard takes it from her, slips it into his own robes, but then doesn’t move. He stares at Hermione for an unnerving stretch of silence, patches of color forming on the center of his cheeks. Finally, he says, in an inanely grave tone of voice, “I think this is _very_ brave of you, Miss Granger.”

Hermione looks down at her feet.

When it’s clear she’s not going to reply, the guard turns away and takes an awkward step towards the panel, retrieving his wand from his robes once more. He orchestrates it all again, murmuring under his breath, and she can see the glow of the wards in the edges of her vision.

The metal sings. It hisses out of existence. The door is opened.

“I’ll be closing this behind you, but you’ll be able to leave at any point if you need to. You’re keyed into the wards. Just touch the panel and you can leave.”

The guard steps back. From where she stands, Hermione can only see a sliver of the room beyond. A glimpse of cold light and more stone.

She steps forward, looks around the corner to see Draco Malfoy’s pale back, folded over on a spare settle, facing away from them both.

She breathes out.

The declaration had been only a few weeks after the war’s end. Wizarding Britain would hold no more scope for terrorism. Anyone with a Mark would be catapulted through the bureaucracy and into the only sentence appropriate for such turpitude:

The Kiss.

It took longer, for him. For the Wizengamot to approve the edict.

And he’s the only one left.

She’s not told Harry or Ron about her visit, hasn’t even worked out her own reasoning. She’s only followed a thought, an impulse. She’s only walked across a thin line she can barely see.

 _Who’s there for him?_ she had thought to herself. _Both parents already gone. A small, dwindling brood of friends who still resent him for the choices he made during the war._

_What’s it like — walking into your own end more alone than you’ve ever been before? What kind of pain is that? How do you even measure it?_

She steps forward, listens to the panel hum back into place behind her. She knows she can leave at any point. Still, it feels like she’s being sealed in. Like there’s much more trapping her beyond a few cautionary wards and sheets of metal and stone.

The room is clearly a cell. It’s clean, at least. Small. All that fits in it is her and him and the jut of the settle. She can feel the gentle barb in the air of maintenance charms. The wash of charmed light, sourceless and tinted blue.

“I thought you’d come.”

Of all the greetings Hermione imagined, this one wasn’t even on the list. She gapes for a moment before she finds her voice. “What? _Really?”_

He spins around, twisting to face her. His eyes are wide and shadowed, his face almost grey. His gaze works across her several times before he says anything more, but from the moment his expression is visible she knows he’s genuinely caught off guard. _“Granger?”_

“Hello.” Hermione glances to the stone wall and then back to him, shifting nervously on her feet. “Who did you think I was?”

His eyes flicker downward, the tension bleeding out of his shoulders. Deflating. He turns back around. So quietly she almost misses it, he says, “I thought it might be Pansy.”

She looks at the dents of his spine, the pale, flat wisps of his hair, the jut of his hipbones extending from the hem of low-slung trousers. She tries to look at something else. The discarded shirt draped beside him. The bare cushion on the settle, thin and near-useless.

“I’m sorry,” she says weakly. She’s not sure what she’s apologizing for. That she’s not Pansy, not one of his friends, visiting him in his final hours? That she disappointed him? That she came at all?

“You can leave.”

Hermione blinks. “What?”

He dips his head down further. She watches his neck stretch as he does, curving away from the angles of his shoulders. His voice is hoarse, rough. He says, _“Go.”_

Something about this suddenly feels normal to her. Typical. Her flash of indignance and heated discontent, his sore dismissal. “No. I’m not leaving. I went out of my way to come here.”

“I don’t want this. I don’t want your charity. Go.”

“I won’t,” she says. She feels more — more of that assurance, of fierce resolve. Her chin lifts a little in the air. “And you can’t make me.”

“What is this?” He turns back around to face her, propping himself up with a hand curled around the settle’s corner. “You felt bad?”

Hermione loses that sense of familiarity as quickly as it had arrived, because she’s looking clearly now, because—

Because he looks haunted.

She shrugs weakly. Her resolve feels flimsy, barely-there. “Maybe.”

“Don’t,” he hisses. “Are you pleased, Granger? That you get to see me like this?”

“Not even a little bit.”

He blinks back at her, shifting where he sits. She thinks she can see something waver in his expression, some flicker of doubt. “What is this?” he repeats. “You can’t get me out. You can’t stop it.”

“No, I can’t,” she admits. And then she steps forward. “Are you sorry?”

One step brings her so near to the settle, so close to him. He looks up at her with his shadowed eyes. “What?”

Hermione doesn’t elaborate. She waits.

“You think remorse matters to me right now?” he asks, fierce once more, reeling back like a coiled spring. “I’ve got my sentence, Granger. I don’t know what you think you’re doing. There’s no question of guilt.”

Hermione feels the strike of several emotions at once, swooping through her like a flock of violent wings. _There’s no question of guilt._ It’s the truth, but it still feels like a tragedy to her. It still makes her want to — to do _something_. To scream or cry or curse.

Finally, he says: _“Yes.”_

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry you’re alone.”

“You’re not,” he says, and Hermione can’t tell if he means sorry or alone. Either way, he’s right. She’s neither. Some of the tension leaks out of his posture again — this odd ebb and flow of edginess. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

He huffs, barely a laugh. “I don’t believe that.”

“I’ve been preoccupied. The only thing I’ve wanted to pursue… it led me here.”

“‘S stupid of you,” he mumbles. “Really fucking stupid.” He twists back to facing the wall across from the doorway, looking conveniently away from her once more. “Really. Go.”

Hermione considers it. Leaving him now, to spend the night in peace. Returning home before her absence is too obvious. Never speaking a word of it to Harry or Ron or anyone else who might tell her how unbalanced she’s become in the wake of the war.

She swings one leg over the settle and straddles it, lowering herself mere inches from his body. He looks sharply to her, and for a brief moment she’s amused. She’s managed to surprise him at least three times since she’s arrived.

It doesn’t last long.

“What would you want?” she asks, an ache in her voice that she’s never heard before. “If you could have anything.”

His gaze flicks back and forth between her eyes, a crease appearing at the center of his forehead. He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What would you want, Draco?”

The use of his first name sparks it. The shift from Draco Malfoy to a nameless man facing the end of his life. To someone who understands they have nothing left — to keep or to lose.

He turns his shoulders towards her. Leans forward. Stops.

He looks to her neck, her shoulder, the curls of her wayward hair draped there, then back to her eyes. He swallows. She can see the flex in his neck, the stretch of his pale skin.

“You’d want a body,” Hermione says, and it’s an understanding she expected, but one that dismays her anyways. It’s not the urge itself, but the impersonal drift of it that disheartens.

He shakes his head again. “That’s not it.”

She holds her breath. The disappointment is gone, suddenly. Vanished in the face of this odd revelation. “No?”

“No,” he says quietly.

She feels it like something resounding, clanging. Like a clock tower striking midnight. It’s not a slap or a strike but rather a drawn-out reverberation. Something to bask in.

She does. She lets herself feel it. She lets it ring.

“You can have what you want, if you like,” she breathes out. “Whatever I can give you right now.”

“Why?”

“Honestly?” She swallows. “Because—”

_Because you’re a dead man. Because in a day, you’ll be soulless. Because I used to think you were soulless, before all this. Because I think now that I was wrong, wrong, wrong._

“No,” he interjects firmly. “Actually, no. Don’t tell me. I don’t care. It doesn’t fucking matter.”

And then he reaches out. His hands find the slant of her shoulders and his fingers curl around the bones. He’s gripping so tightly it hurts, but he stops there. He stops. “I _hate_ you,” he whispers, eyes blazing.

Hermione nods. She considers her options, briefly. Considers _him._

“Sure,” she says. “You can hate me, Draco.”

She’s not going to ask him to be gentle. She’s made it clear that she’s here to give, but she’s asking him to give, too. She’s laying down a flume for that exchange. And it’s all a little bit greedy, this want of hers to see what he has left. To see what he could have been.

She has to pause to marvel at how selfish it is, thinking about what _she_ is going to lose, when he’s the one on the gallows.

“I do,” he says, punctuating it with a little shake to her shoulders. “I do. I hate you.”

She tries for a smile. It must come off like more of a grimace, trying to lift the corners of her mouth when the rest of her face wants to contort the opposite way. It’s wiped clean, though, when his hands jump from her shoulders to her legs, when they hook beneath her knees and _pull,_ and she’s sliding forward and down without warning and her lips part in a silent, _“Oh.”_

She’s on her back on the settle, and he’s looming over her, and he’s just told her he hates her, he’d say it over and over again if she let him, and there’s a list in her head of a hundred reasons why this is _stupid,_ why it’s senseless and insane—

“I mean it,” he hisses, and then leans down to kiss her.

Their teeth knock together, first. A clang and a clash. It only takes one second of correction, though, for him to pull back and realign their lips, for the next slide to be nothing but the pleasant slick warmth of their mouths, and _this,_ this is the exchange. It’s the giving. The only list left in her head goes as follows:

1\. This feels good.

2\. It is good. It’s so _good._

3\. It’s never going to last.

She arches into him, lifting her hands to his neck, but then he’s pulling back, still close enough for his breath to fan out warm across her cheek. “You’re sure you can’t break me out of here, Granger?”

“I can’t do anything,” she says, her voice wobbling. “I can’t — I’m—”

“Hush,” he says into her neck, pressing his lips to the pulse point beneath her ear. She knows her heartbeat is drumming violently, knows he can feel it there, but the warmth of his mouth feels more like recognition than judgement. He kisses down, takes his time, finds the dip of her collarbone and bites against the bone, then soothes the skin with his tongue.

She’s not sure if it’s supposed to feel this good. Certainly not under the circumstances. Still, she gasps, she writhes underneath it, tries to catalogue the sensations so she can hold onto them later. Her hands skate down to his shoulders, then dip down lower, find purchase on his ribs. “God, this is — it’s—”

“What?” He lifts himself up again. His eyes seem so much darker, his face warped into a cruel scowl when he says, “You think this is sick?”

She wants to shake her head. She wants to say, _“Not at all.”_ But all she does is lay there, frozen, blinking up at him while she tries to force her breaths into a steady rhythm.

He doesn’t wait for her to find her bearings. He reaches for the hem of her shirt and starts pulling it up — yanking, really. It’s an awkward fumble, but she does what she can to help maneuver her arms through the fabric, lifting her neck so it can slide up and around her head. Then he’s leaning back and stretching wildly, so full of angry fervor, wrenching the flats from her feet and then grabbing the ends of her denims and tugging.

She huffs out a laugh. Reaches down to help him, unbuttoning her denims and lifting her hips. It’s thinly-veiled floundering, it’s _ridiculous._ He’s all but tore the clothes from her body. But—

There’s something tender there.

The way he leans back and appraises her. The way his hands start to skate up and down her legs, nearly hovering, his touch barely-there. “What do you think, then, Granger?”

She thinks she’s sprawled out in front of Draco Malfoy in her bra and knickers, in a Ministry cell, stuck in the middle of a secret not yet fully-formed. She thinks she’s really not about to try to throw sense into the mix now.

So she lifts her hands to the junctures where his neck meets his shoulders and pulls him down, down to her. She considers that smothering has never felt like such a beautiful word before, because she wants to be covered, she wants him everywhere. “I think—” She widens her legs, brazen and arrant. “I think this is right.”

He kisses her again. He tastes somehow both like toothpaste and ash. He slides a hand across her stomach, skirting across the edge of her knickers, and then boldly palming her through the fabric. She sighs — loudly — and then their kisses turn into something else, just the press of open mouths, the exchange of their breaths.

As soon as his fingers are gone, she’s lifting her hips, pressing into him as boldly as she can manage. She doesn’t care about the pace. All that matters — it’s just this. Just this.

He pulls back and she wants to curse the sudden absence, until seconds later he returns, until she meets again the feverish warmth of his skin, pressed against her in so many places. Until she feels something, tentative, positioned between her legs.

She nods urgently, earnestly, her chin knocking against his shoulder, her fingers curling into the skin of his back. It’s all the go-ahead she feels she can muster, and, evidently, it’s enough, because one second later the fabric is pushed aside and he’s sliding into her achingly slow.

She knows what it’s supposed to feel like. This is something else. Something so overwhelming she feels the sharp prick of tears behind her eyes, the shame of it burning so bright alongside the burn of his body. And it’s good, it _is_. So good she wants to weep.

He’s breathing as if he’s in pain, and she gets it. She does. Joined like this, she can barely think, doesn’t even try to when he begins to rock into her. His mouth leaves hers and he tucks his face into the crook of her neck, instead, hidden in her hair. He’s bolstered by his arms, bracketed on either side of her, and she wraps her own more tightly around his back. Squeezes, as if to pull him closer, when they’re as close as can be.

It’s not enough.

Some sick part of her wants it to be projected like a film in the Ministry Atrium, across the pages of the Prophet. She wants as many people to see it as possible. She wants to look at a crowd of officials, of guards, of executioners, wants to say, _Look at this._ Wants to say, _Look how good this can be. How good_ he _can be._

Everything rattles within her, the blood pounding in her neck down to her toes, until she shatters, barely aware it’s happening, too far gone to form anything beyond a broken groan as the world splinters and simmers white.

When she comes to, he’s still, pressing down on her like a dead weight. She shifts, runs her fingers against the jut of his spine, and it jerks him into motion.

He springs off of her like he was shoved. Slides down to the floor beside the settle and pushes himself against the stone wall of the cell. He won’t meet her eyes, but Hermione can see the tremble of his fingers, wrapped around bruised knees.

She sits up slowly. Finds her shirt, discarded on the ground next to the settle, and pulls it back over her head. And then she slides down next to him. Positions herself like his reflection, legs curled up and fingers shaking. The stone against her back hurts — it’s too rough, too cold, but she can lean into his side and relieve it, a bit.

She realizes she can’t cast a _Tempus,_ not when her wand’s been taken away. There’s no clock in the cell. The charmed light hasn’t wavered. It’s another twisted part of this routine, keeping him somewhere where he can’t tell with any certainty how much time he has life. Where he doesn’t know when the door will open next, doesn’t know who will be on the other side.

So she sits with him and waits. Wraps them both back up in their clothing, then curls against him and the rigid stone.

And when, outside, the clock strikes five—

They take her away.


End file.
